Savage Love

Savage Love: Sharing your kinks

I’m a 30-year-old straight woman who has been with the same guy (high-school sweetheart!) for the last 13 years. We love each other deeply, best friends, etc. The problem isn’t that the sex isn’t good — he’s very good at making me come. But the sex is vanilla and routine, and I would like us to go beyond that. Nothing extreme, I just want to switch things up a bit.

Talking about sex makes my husband REALLY uncomfortable. If I ask him what he’d like me to do to him while we’re having sex, he shuts down. He’ll say, “Everything you do is good,” and leave it there. In the very few conversations we’ve had about this stuff, he’s said that he feels intimidated and doesn’t know what to say. This is incredibly frustrating for me. How do I get him to loosen up and feel more comfortable about talking to me so that we can eventually progress to some new experiences?
Why Husband Is Prudish

Have you told him what you want? If you haven’t — if you’re as vague in your conversations with him as you were in your letter to me — you’re essentially asking your husband to guess at your undisclosed interests or kinks. Your husband is probably terrified of guessing wrong. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what to say — but he’s told you he’s fine with whatever you want to do. So stop asking him what he wants to do to you, WHIP, and start doing whatever it is you want to do. Take the initiative, be the change you want to see in the sack, lean in or bend over or whatever.

From your sign-off, WHIP, I’m guessing you’re interested in some type of BDSM play, most likely with you in the sub role. So lay your kink cards on the table and offer to dominate him first. A lot of subs do some topping, i.e., doing unto others as they would like done unto them, and some subs become tops exclusively. But take baby steps, it’s mild before wild, you gotta nail those junior-varsity kinks before moving up to varsity-level kinks, etc.